The Life Which Is Unexamined Is Not Worth Living

Of Heavy Rain and Disappointment

I was walking to IPB Debating Community secretariat when all of a sudden torrents of waters were falling down, hard. Luckily I was inside a building, unlike those motorcycle riders on the road that had no choice but to rush through the rain. It was indeed a heavy rain, those big droplets of waters were accompanied by heavy wind, making corridors wet and slippery. So I decided to just sit on a chair while waiting for the rain to stop, observing my surroundings.

In front of me, I saw heavy wind slapping big banners, sending drops of waters to the area where chairs were arranged like a hearings was supposed to happen here. Well, it was supposed to happen, but clearly, this heavy rain made this area unconducive to hold said event. Thanks to the heavy rain that happened out of the blue, they have to move those chairs, tables, banners, out to the new place. I wondered if they have a new place ready or if they’d have to delay the event. From the looks of it, this seemed like an important event, so my money goes to them conducting the event in another place. Within minutes, they managed to empty the area. What was suppose to be the place where an event took place was just an empty space with wet, dirty floor now.

It must be frustrating to see an event you have planned for weeks, or even months, to not go according to the plan. As someone who have organized an event myself, I knew how unlikely it is to have our event goes according to the plan. There’s that one time when I was being an adj core for a debate competition but our invited adjudicator was held by a big traffic on the way, forcing us to delay the event. I also ever witnessed how one debate team has to drop out of a competition because one of their teammate was still on the way to the tournament. There’s just too much factor we can’t control that affect the outcome of our plan. Having one plan only would be an unwise move to make, what we should do instead was to make preparation to respond to any change that could happen along the way.

But can we really prepare ourselves for a perfect storm that could put our plan to shambles? Say you are conducting a seminar but all of your speakers are unable to come. Or you are going to a tournament but everyone in your team except you got food poisoning. No amount of preparation could make us ready to respond to situations like that. But knowing that shits do happen, what should we do?We can’t make shits not happenning but we can choose what kind of reaction we have when shits happen. Weather, traffic jam, what others do, climate change, government’s stupidity might not be within our control, but our feelings and our action are. Now that we realize that we can do nothing when perfect storm arises, I think it’s going to be wise to prepare for the worst since the very beginning. Know that no matter how perfect our plan is, things cannot always go our way and we should be ready for it. Difference between expectation and reality is what drives us to be unsatisfied and unhappy, set our bar low enough and we’d have our kevlar vest for disappointment. We can cry our hearts out when things don’t go according to the plan, feel better, and move on, or we can let that failure drags us down for days, weeks, or months. It’s our choice to make, and a pretty easy one for me.

For me, heavy rain reminds me on how things can easily fall apart. What about you? What does heavy rain remind you about?

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2 thoughts on “Of Heavy Rain and Disappointment”

Nice post. Heavy rain – depends where I am. Inside – the sound of heavy rain on the roof and beating against the windows is peaceful. Although it can be upsetting if it hits right when I am getting my daughter from school. Heavy rain reminds me that there are many things we cannot control.